1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus connected to a printer engine for effecting printing operation based on an input command, an information processing method for such information processing apparatus, and a printing system including such information processing apparatus.
2. Related Background Art
In the conventional system of this kind, in registering a font in the printer, the host computer is not designed to recognize whether the necessary capacity is available in the registration memory of the printer.
Also the font is ordinarily registered in a volatile registration memory, but it is not customary to store a registered font in a non-volatile registration memory. And it is not customary to recognize the information of the registered font by the host computer if the font is registered in the non-volatile registration memory.
Also in case of storing a compressed registered font in the registration memory, it is customary to effect compression either in the host computer or in the printer, and it is not customary to share such compression by the host computer and the printer, or to execute the font registration based on the information on the frequency of usage of characters, stored in the host computer.
In the conventional apparatus, however, since the host computer is incapable of recognizing whether a capacity is available in the registration memory the registration process is continued even if the memory capacity is not available.
On the other hand, since the printer disregards the registration process after the memory capacity becomes full, the characters registered after the memory capacity becomes full, cannot be printed.
Also the font is ordinarily registered in a volatile registration memory and the registered font is erased when the power supply of the printer is turned off, so that the registered font cannot be utilized again.
Furthermore, in the storage of the compressed registration font in the registration memory, there result a drawback that the load of compression is entirely applied to the host computer or the printer since the compression is executed only in the host computer or in the printer, and another drawback that the registration memory cannot be effectively utilized since even the characters that are used only once in the print data are also registered in the printer.